How To Avoid Spam Filters And Reach the Inbox Every Single Time

In our Email FAQs series, we answer your email marketing questions! In this episode, Daniel Kohn, the Founder of SmartMail, answers this email marketing question he gets asked all the time by online retailers: How can I avoid spam filters?

Watch the video below to find out! You can also read the full article or listen to the audio at the bottom of the post.

Welcome back to e-commerce email FAQs.

Today’s FAQ we’re gonna be looking at a really important topic around the number one way to avoid spam filters.

So I’m not sure about you, but I hear over and over again companies who, you know, send out emails and they’ve noticed that, you know, half of them or three quarters of them end up in spam folder.

How can you avoid that? And so the main way to avoid that is to really consider this.

The way Gmail and all these clients work is that the more engagement your email has with a group of people, so if you have, you know, a 100 people on your list and 50 of them are @gmail.com’s, and you send an email to all 50 of those people, Gmail looks at how all 50 of those people have engaged with that particular email. So it’s collectively.

So if you can collectively get people to engage more with your emails, then Google are more likely to look at the email and go, “You know what? These guys who send these emails are always sending emails that are highly engaged by the audience, so we’re not going to put them into the spam folder.”

Because the top of the inbox is very hot real estate.

If you think about it, people who are checking their email and the whole, you know, a function of a good email client. And I think one of the main reasons why Google has become so successful at, you know, beating Hotmail.

I mean, Hotmail used to be the hottest most used platform until. But today it’s Gmail. And I think it’s because they have got much better algorithms that are identifying what’s good, what should go to the top of the pile, and what should get bumped out straight away.

And so really to avoid spam filters, you know, one of the most important things you could do is to really consider what you’re actually sending your customers.

Create Winning Subject Lines

If you’re sending them emails with just generic content and nothing very interesting to say and you’re just sending it because, you know, you think that’s what you need to do and you’re just kinda like towing the party line, well then, no one is gonna open them, no one is gonna click on them, and eventually, your spam rate is gonna increase because you just keep sending average information to people who aren’t really that interested.

If you wanna really attract people’s interest, the first thing you gotta do is have a really compelling subject line. So asking a question on your subject line.

I’m actually gonna make a video on subject line, so look out for that. I might link to it from this particular video.

But having a really compelling subject line. Because that basically tells Google that if lots of people open the email, it means they’re interested in what you have to say.

Why would Google put that email into spam if you’ve got a really subject line, right?

So the first thing is research how to put a really good subject line together. If you just Google that in, if you put that into Google, it’ll come up with 10 articles and just read 5 of them and start A/B testing different subject lines because that’s gonna be the main metric of improving your open rate.

Get Your Click-Through Rates Up

The second metric of making sure that you don’t hit spam filters is having a really good click-through rate.

And having a really good click-through rate depending on what you’re selling or depending on what you’re trying to say, if you’ve got a really good offer, if you’ve got really good deals, again, if you’re just sending people the same information, it’s really not that interesting.

No one is gonna click on your emails, and that tells Google that you’re not interesting or appealing for these people. So people might opening but they’re not clicking. And so that’s another metric that you wanna really focus on to avoid spam filters.

You know what? I’m gonna make a video if you’re already in the spam filter and how to get out of it. I think that’s another really good video.

But, you know, a main way to avoid it is to really think about what I’m just telling you now. Because if you keep sending compelling content with strong enough subject lines, you’re not gonna hit the spam filter and you will have success in getting those emails delivered.

Now, sometimes you can start sending emails like automatically. If you just start sending emails automatically, like if you upload a list of 50,000 people into MailChimp and you just blast that entire list, it is quite possible that you might hit spam filters straight away.

And so one of the things that you wanna do to avoid that is to upload you list and maybe start warming the list up a little bit.

Segment Your List

So if you start segmenting your list and rather than just emailing everybody all at once, if you’re able to take, you know, from that list to create a segment of all the previous openers, people who open say maybe four of five times in the last two months and just email those people first, or openers and clickers and create that segment of your list, and rather than just blasting your entire list like sending an email to those people and starting to warm up your engagement level both with MailChimp and the delivery of your server on MailChimp with all the emails clients. And so that’s a really good way of actually avoiding the spam filters if you’re just getting started as well with a new email client like MailChimp.

And so, hopefully, that was helpful.

But really it’s not so complicated if you think about it.

Send Emails With Relevant Content to Increase Engagement

If you really wanna avoid spam filters, don’t send bad emails, just keep them compelling, make sure you’re putting in good offers or you’re saying something interesting that’s gonna make them want to click.

If they’re not clicking, the other thing that I would do as well after a period of time is segment your list out and maybe start emailing just people who opened and clicked in the last, say, 60 days. And you might end up emailing a lot less people, but what you’re actually gonna do is cut out all the clutter, right?

And so all the people that’s kinda like deadweight on your list and they’re bringing down like your rating with Google, just cut them out because they’re not helping, they’re not adding.

Increased Engagement = Entry to the Inbox

Email marketing is not about, you know, who’s sending out the most emails, it’s a lot of the time it can be about getting your emails delivered.

And so that’s another really good way to make sure your emails do get delivered. Is cutting out all the deadweight from your list and just emailing people who are your openers and clickers for a period of time and starting to see how that actually works for you as well.

So thanks for watching. Hopefully this was helpful. And stay tune for more e-commerce email FAQs.